Every day, more and more of the earth is covered with
pavement; every day, more and more cars crowd onto those
pavements, old and new, pressing together like maggots as
they inch desperately towards their distant goals. Every day,
new voices bemoan the fate we force relentlessly onto our
future, and every day those voices tout solutions to the
problem--solutions that often require the wholesale physical
restructuring of cities that cannot afford even to patch a
pothole, or that ask for saintly dedication from a populace
that routinely drives its children three blocks to the local
school. Perhaps we have the luxury of waiting for a
Haussmann to appear and restructure Los Angeles or
Phoenix or your favorite stucco suburb along the lines of
Paris with its Metro and its arrondissements; perhaps we
have the energy to fight the inertia of money and old
thought, to tell the developers that people choose what they
offer because they offer nothing else to choose--perhaps we
do. But while we wait for Haussman to be reincarnated and
developers to develop hearts of gold, there is something we
can do that will, without requiring vast changes in
infrastructure or the spirit of mankind, persuade even
Americans to leave the car in the driveway and walk down
the street with their neighbors to the nearest bus stop, and
that is an old practice that I will give the new name of
"subsidy-switching." To put it simply: let us no longer
subsidize cars, as is now done in the United States and too
many other countries which follow its lead, but let them pay
their own way; and let us fully subsidize public transport.

There's More to This than Meets the Eye--or Ear
After all, we live now in an atmosphere of opinion that
vomits forth great thundering torrents of invective against
the idea that public monies might in any way subsidize
private behavior--yet after a gasp for breath those same
mouths passionately defend the "right" to pave over as much
of the earth as possible for the convenience of those who
wish to drive about alone in little metal boxes, and don't you
even think of raising gas taxes!... They are perfectly willing
to let general tax revenues support the majority of the
infrastructure and personnel costs required to keep them
driving (and parking) on their billions of acres of formerly
productive soil. Let us make a rather incomplete list of what
it takes in public expense to keep a car rolling in our cities:

Side streets, main streets, curbs, driveways, drains (which
foul the rivers and oceans with engine drippings and tire
rubber, which the government cleans up for drivers);

Freeways, highways, beltways, parkways, ramps, and
interchanges, all so a car can do quite badly what a train can
do quite well;

Streetlights, stopsigns, traffic signals, freeway
placards, paint stripes, and more, all of which must be not
only applied but maintained;

Constant street maintenance
from wear caused by unnecessary driving;

Parking cops,
traffic cops, paramedics, highway cops, helicopters;

The vast
bureaucracies of Motor Vehicle Departments; bridges and
tunnels and their maintenance;

The maintenance of a very
large armed forces used mostly (in the last twenty years) to
protect access to foreign oil; and

City-built parking

All these
represent a direct financial burden on the governments of our
country, a burden which is only modestly ameliorated by fuel
taxes and other fees imposed on private automobile use.
(Commercial vehicles pay higher taxes, often on a per-mile
basis.) In Europe, gas taxes are famously high because car
users are required to pay their way rather than get a free ride
at the rest of society's expense. In the US, the private
automobile driver is the biggest welfare user of them all.

But
direct public expenses are not the whole story, either: what
about indirect expenses? Here's another short list:

Air
pollution, which decreases the value of everybody's property
and incurs great costs in sickness and in lost productivity of
agricultural land, schoolchildren, and workers--those costs
are borne by all;

Congestion, with its toll on health through
nervous stress and on the economy through lost time--those
costs are borne by all;

Sedentarism encouraged by car use,
resulting in early incapacity and death from lack of exercise-
-those costs are borne by all;

The alienation of people from
their communities when they are forced into private cars and
freeway channels by lack of alternatives, and their alienation
from their families, caused by the time and energy taken up
by their commuting inefficiently--those costs are borne by
all;

The loss of tax base to low-valuation parking lots and
streets, resulting in the cities making up the taxes not
gathered there from other areas, or by not providing services
that would have been paid for by those taxes--those costs are
borne by all;

The degradation of the value of life that happens
when the city becomes unpleasant to live in because of the
effects of excessive paving and driving--those costs are borne
by all and cannot be compensated for in any material way.

By all these means and more is driving subsidized by all of
society in kind or through the governments. Yet it is
essentially a private preference we are thus subsidizing: for
there are other means for getting around that do not have so many
deleterious effects, financially, physically, or emotionally,
and which should be fully subsidized so that they may
provide similar travel services to the car at less cost and
lower environmental effect, improving the health and
cohesiveness of the communities they could serve. I refer of
course to rail and bus systems, especially rail, which once
built has lower maintenance costs than bus use, and which is
far more efficient in its use of space and energy than any
road-based system can be.

In Europe, where nearly as many people own cars as in the
United States, car use is lower, because cars are taxed in
proportion to the social costs they incur, and public transport
is subsidized as a benefit to all of society, even that part
which does not use public transport. The car is there seen as
what it really is in most instances--a recreational vehicle.
People can perform their essential travel on foot, by bicycle, and
on buses, trolleys, and subways.

What Good Is It?
Some values of public transport are obvious, some are not.
That more people on the subway means fewer cars on the
road is obvious: and fewer cars on the road means less oil out
of the ground; less pollution in the air; less need for paving
over yet more acreage for roads and parking; less noise
irritating citizens on the streets and sidewalks, in businesses,
and in their homes; and less congestion of the roads--leaving
them more pleasant, in fact, for those who must or choose to
continue driving in their cars. Less congestion means also
that those internal combustion vehicles which do use the road
will operate at higher levels of mechanical efficiency because
of fewer starts and stops; and less congestion also means that
more people will be willing to use bicycles on the road
instead of cars, leading to an even greater improvement in
traffic flow, personal health, and the quality of civic life.

But all these are still negative benefits of the increased use of
public transport, brought about by what it prevents or
obviates; there are positive benefits of public transport use as
well. One of the finest positive effects of public transport is
that it can reestablish people in their own communities and
in the agglomeration of communities that form a modern
city. After all, instead of walking twenty feet from your
door to your car and sealing yourself into it, you would be
walking down the block to the bus stop, or around the corner
to the subway station, and on the way you would certainly
stop and say hello to your neighbor watering the lawn, to the
local children on their way to school, or to the grocer getting
off the bus herself to open her store. And once on
the bus (or train) yourself, if you had a long enough way to go, you
would pass through various communities of your city, and as
you did, members of those communities would get on the
bus, perhaps sit by you a while, and then get off, to be
replaced by others as the miles went by. You would be part
of your neighborhood and part of your city, instead of just
another person with an address that is nothing more than a
number in a book. It is telling that many of the Western
cities that are known, worldwide, for providing rich cultural
experiences--New York, Paris, San Francisco--are those that
were built into their present form before excessive deference
to the private auto became the paradigm of urban planning.
Eliminating the giveaway that private automobile users now
enjoy without thought or thanks, and using the cash to build
up public transport systems and make them available to all at
low or no charge, would go a long way towards making our
cities livable again.

Harass a Politician--They're Paid to Listen to You
Subsidy-switching is something we can start to bring about
right now, promoting it vigorously to the politicians and
administrators who control urban policy. Metro Rail is
slowly and controversially, but steadily, being built in Los
Angeles, the Disgraceland of car culture; toll roads (a
palliative, but not, in my mind, a cure) have sprung up in the
stony heart of Orange County; and even President Clinton
has heard of carbon taxes and supports them, if only
(typically) in theory. New ideas, and good older ideas, have
a better chance now than at any other time since the late
'Thirties. People are tired of devoting a quarter of each day to
being automobile operators, they are tired of noisy cities,
crowded nervous streets, and dirty air. But car use is kept
artificially cheap, and alternatives literally do not exist in
many parts of the world. With subsidy-switching, we can
reverse that sentence, and free ourselves and our neighbors
to live out the happier possibilities of urban life.